November 2012

Yesterday I presented the Secrets of Running Your Agency as a TCA webinar. A major part of the session was the mindset of the agency owner and the agent. For small businesses (employee size wise), the business owner or agent determines the fate of the business. Sometimes, we forget that it is a business.

This isn't a political rant. I have been reading many of the summaries of why Romney lost his presidential bid. Channelnomics and ARS examined the IT spending of both campaigns and found that Romney bought from Best Buy's mindShift (an MSP). The one point they got wrong is that the Dems have two online systems for campaigning developed during Obama's first run for office.

All this Black Friday talk is not going to help the retailers. The early Black Friday buzz and "leaks" are only signaling that retailers are hurting. These current actions by retailers are not going to help the bottom line. Pricing matching Amazon being just one of these actions.

AT&T announced that it would spend $14 Billion dollars on wireless and wireline networks over the next three years. What a bunch of hoopla over not much. AT&T already spends between $7B and $9B annually on its wireless network. The rest will be used to hit 1 million businesses with fiber.

There was a lot of talk about Insurance in this political season. Insurance companies decide who they will cover. For example, in Florida, insurance companies decide who they will offer a home owners' policy. In Healthcare, the insurance company decides, not only who they will cover, but what they will cover.

Microcorp announced a deal with TDMobility (here and here). I have written about TDMobility before (most recently here and before), where I proposed that it would be a small leap for TDMobility to become a master agency. Instead, TDMobility teamed up with a master agent, Microcorp, instead.

"Telecom is no stranger to change." Moreso today than ever, huh? Yesterday, Chris Palermo of GCN, a telecom brokerage firm, was on a panel with Level3 discussing the Global Crossing-Level3 integration at Microcorp's One-on-One event.

Palermo gave some advice to agents that they can't be complacent, that they need to Adapt to survive.

I have been working on some cloud services projects, including go-to-market strategy. These 9 little slides are what you need to be thinking about when you are entering the cloud market. When I spoke with Sonian CTO Greg Arnette yesterday, one thing that he said that crystallized it for me was: like Netflix, Sonian built from the ground up to be a cloud company and wrote code to take advantage of cloud infrastructure like AWS. This is very different from sticking a box in a data center and calling it cloud.

Storm Sandy has flooded NYC and taken out power, which has resulted in quite a few data centers to have operational issues (i.e., stop working). The data centers experiencing outages include 75 Broad Street; 33 Whitehall (Cogent); 882 3rd Ave (nLayer, XO, Cogent, Verizon, Sidera and AT&T); 111 8th Ave (Voxel, Internap); and 121 Varick. [Paetec/Windstream are having outages but no idea what data center these use. Info about outages from slashdot, CNN and here.]